Because if we indeed do give them money, that will just encourage more people to become pirates.

It’s a matter of principle:

You pay them $4 million now and they will be back again for another highjacking/kidnapping/ransom. It simply emboldens their behavior.

The theory is that if you stop them now (regardless of the cost) you will prevent them from going after US ships in the future.

Because if we pay the 4 million, that will only encourage them to take more ships and we’ll paying similar ransoms for years. Just think of it as another part of the stimulus bill.

He should give them money in floatable luggage and after the hostage is returned sink the boat.

But then there would be an international outcry about how the pirate had been mistreated.

The fleet would be patrolling somewhere else if not near the raft. How does this increase expenditures? The problem is that Obama is not DOING anything to the pirates, such as blowing their heads off, which would discourage piracy in the future. In the end, he Kenyan will probably give them green cards and let them live out the rest of their lives on welfare in the United States.

And had he paid them a ransom, they would have said to themselves, “Hey, that was easy enough. Let’s do it again to an American boat.”

We also know that what ever course of action he took, the conservative / republican echo noise machine would have found nothing but fault with it, since the Grand Old Party of NO is stuck in that mode at the current time.

OK, now I am confused. as a loyal Obama-Bot, i thought the position held by the evil deceptocon republicans was that he was doing nothing. now your saying he is spending too much.

How can he spend too much, there is an American life at stake. no amount is too great to spend to save one American. get with the program!

Just take them out.. That would be cheaper. $0.27 a round. Also it would teach others that the U.S.A. still dosen’t play around..

Cry about my remark, but taking a U.S. Flagged ship is an act of war…

One of the enduring lessons of the Barbary campaigns was to never give in to outlaws, whether you call them pirates or terrorists. In the late 1700s, America paid significant blackmail for peace — shelling out $990,000 to the Algerians alone at a time when national revenues totaled just $7 million.

“Too many concessions have been made to Algiers,” U.S. consul William Eaton wrote to the Secretary of State in 1799. “There is but one language which can be held to these people, and this is terror.”

Because of their outlaw conduct, pirates — and modern-day terrorists — put themselves outside protection of the law, according to military strategy expert Dave McIntyre, a former dean at the National War College. “On the high seas if you saw a pirate, you sank the *******,” he says. “You assault pirates, you don’t arrest pirates.”